Crocus reticulatus

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Crocus reticulatus, photographed by Юрий Данилевский (Yuriy Danilevsky) — fig. b Юрий Данилевский (Yuriy Danilevsky), CC BY 4.0 / obs. 180469821

Crocus reticulatus, photographed by Dmitrii Ignatev — fig. d Dmitrii Ignatev, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 129595746

Crocus reticulatus, photographed by Nikita Gerasin — fig. e Nikita Gerasin, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 118009801

Crocus reticulatus, photographed by Елена Патерикина — fig. f Елена Патерикина, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 124212371

Crocus reticulatus, photographed by Valerii Darmostuk — fig. g Valerii Darmostuk, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 118443198

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Native range 5 botanical countries

Native distribution of Crocus reticulatus, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Central European Russia	RUC	EUROPE
South European Russia	RUS
Ukraine	UKR
North Caucasus	NCS	ASIA-TEMPERATE
Transcaucasus	TCS

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Flowering 122 in flower of 131 examined

100%

91%

94%

Proportion of examined Crocus reticulatus in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	9	9	100%	70% to 100%
Feb	42	46	91%	80% to 97%
Mar	65	69	94%	86% to 98%
Apr	3	3	too few examined
May	2	2	too few examined
Jun	1	1	too few examined
Jul	0	0	too few examined
Aug	0	1	too few examined
Sep	0	0	too few examined
Oct	0	0	too few examined
Nov	0	0	too few examined
Dec	0	0	too few examined

Peak flowering in Jan. Each bar is the share of Crocus reticulatus observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 122 of 131 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 9 months have fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for them. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Where it actually grows measured, from 1,504 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-8.7 °C	-5.0 °C	-1.9 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	22.0 °C	26.9 °C	28.1 °C
Annual rainfall	448 mm	572 mm	964 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	81 mm	98 mm	193 mm

It is found where winters bring hard frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 1,504 research-grade observations of Crocus reticulatus that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one. Climate from CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al. 2017); occurrences from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 6 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

Crocus luteus M.Bieb.
Crocus reticulatus subvar. rectilimbus (Herb.) Herb.
Crocus reticulatus var. albicans Herb.
Crocus reticulatus var. auritextus Herb.
Crocus reticulatus var. immaculatus Herb.
Crocus reticulatus var. rectilimbus Herb.

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.